Dan McClellan > Quotes

“Any time somebody says "a real man does this, says this, and wears this" that is an observation that gender is a social construct. It is all of the behaviours and the relationships and the norms and the circumstances that are around this concept of what a male person is.”
― Dan McClellan

“There’s a very common claim that I see repeated all the time on social media that the Bible is sixty-six books that were written by forty-five different authors, in three different languages, across three different continents, and over the course of around 1,500 years. This is based on the assumption that every last syllable of the Bible is historically accurate, though, and from the point of view of critical scholarship, it’s only partly correct. It would be more accurate to say that more than one hundred authors and even more editors wrote, edited, and compiled the Bible in three different languages, across two different continents, over the course of somewhere around 1,100 years.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues

“...a better argument is going to be made in the direction of more nuance and complexity, not less. A better argument is going to move the consensus further away from, not closer to, rhetorical utility for privileged and powerful groups seeking to weaponize the Bible to serve their own interests.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“In all different kinds of fields of study, you have to establish certain principles and foundations on which to build other things. Once you've established something that becomes conventionalized... Whether it's because we've proven it beyond a shadow of a doubt, or because it makes the most sense to us... You can construct pretty complex constellations of ideas off of agreements, and sometimes those agreements later fall to pieces, and then everything around it falls to pieces as well.”
― Dan McClellan

“Nobody in a position of influence over a community of Bible believers subordinates their needs and interests entirely to the Bible. There is no such thing as a 'Biblical literalist.' There are idealogical literalists, sure, but the Bible is secondary for those folks. No one derives their doctrines, their ethics, or their worldviews exclusively or even primarily from the Bible. Those things are derived from negotiations that take place between a group's past, its needs in the present, its goals for the future, and its interpretations of the Bible.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“Across the modern Christian world, legal and moral personhood is only assigned to fetuses within the debate about the morality of abortion, and for ideologies directly influenced by that debate. Outside of that debate, they are consistently denied legal and moral personhood.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“There's no one, consistent concept of Hell in the Bible. For the majority of the Bible, in fact, there's not concept of Hell at all. Notions of postmortem divine punishment can differ wildly from author to author, and even within individual books, and nothing like the modern conceptual package that is 'Hell' is articulated anywhere.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“This is something that plagues a lot of our thinking... We get raised with certain... Ideologies... Traditions and conventional wisdom, and because we spend that lifetime experiencing those same things, we assume that they just go all the way back, and when we look into the past, we retroject those things... Because we have to reconstruct what we're seeing in the past, and so we use those same frameworks to facilitate that reconstruction.”
― Dan McClellan

“But if the Bible is going to remain an authority, and all indications are that it will, then I think a more productive and transparent approach for those who hold it up as an authority would be to acknowledge and criticize its harmful ideologies, and then to openly advocate for renegotiation.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“There is no "the" dictionary. There is no "the" definition. There are definitions, and none of them has any authority over any one else. "The Ministry of What Words Mean" doesn't exist, and they did not crown any definition the king definition...”
― Dan McClellan

“The more meaningful and powerful a specific reading is today, the more careful we should be with that reading. It's actually less likely to be what was intended by the original authors... The more it feels like the Bible may be speaking directly to us... the more closely we need to interrogate our interpretations and what may be motivating them.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“But even just talking about 'The Bible' is already imposing an organizing framework on these texts that didn't exist for any of their authors and wouldn't have meant anything to them.”
― Dan McClellan

“...in 1 Corinithians 11:14... Paul rhetorically asks, 'Doesn't even nature itself teach that if a man wears long hair, it is dishonorable to him?"

No, Paul, it doesn't.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“There's no one, consistent concept of Hell in the Bible. For the majority of the Bible, in fact, there's no concept of Hell at all. Notions of postmortem divine punishment can differ wildly from author to author, and even within individual books, and nothing like the modern conceptual package that is 'Hell' is articulated anywhere.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“Contrary to popular belief, the 1611 King James Version included the entire apocrypha, although more compact editions of the KJV were frequently published without it.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“Apocalyptic imagery is often intentionally vague and imprecise, which means it can become interpretively flexible, allowing for application to all kinds of circumstances. And the more time passes, and the further away from the original context the text gets, the more it can merge with the prophetic genre and give license to all kinds of renegotiations and rhetorical deployments.

The influence the Bible has had on the world may have been drastically different, had the book of Revelation not wriggled its way into the canon right at the tail-end of the process of canonization.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“The hypersexualization of the female body today is socially determined. It's not a transcultural or a transhistorical constant. Nudity in the Bible didn't carry near the same social significance that it does today. We've overwhelmingly coded nudity as a sexual event, but anciently, it was a far more common public event that could be associated with work (John 21:7), and even with public prophecy (Isaiah 20:2-3, Micah 1:8, 1 Samuel 19:24).”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“The reality is that there is no such thing as a 'Biblical literalist.' Everyone who treats the Bible as an inspired and/or authoritative document negotiates with it. There is no other possible choice.”
― Dan McClellan

“When people today insist Paul's sexual ethic must remain relevant, they're almost always referring to the condemnation of same-sex intercourse. They're almost never talking about celibacy, avoiding having kids, or passionless sex meant to keep the urges at bay.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“The more meaningful and powerful a specific reading is today, the more careful we should be with that reading. It's actually less likely to be what was intended by the original authors.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“The folks who wield the authority of the Bible most vehemently and belligerently are just as willing to negotiate with the Bible as anyone else.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“But the Bible says' is far too simple an evasion of the reader's responsibility. We can claim to be sharing what the Bible 'says' if we're just quoting it verbatim, but the instant we paraphrase those words or try to explain what they mean to modern events, circumstances, relationships, or identities, or how they should be applied, the Bible is no longer 'saying' anything at all; we're just using the Bible as a bullhorn to authorize, validate, and amplify what we're saying.”
― Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues

“They're performing that. ... Those arguments are isolating a tiny little sliver of real math and real science to say "if we look at this little part right here, then that can be made to fit if you squint hard enough at it, and therefore the whole rest of the scientific community can just be summarily dismissed.”
― Dan McClellan

“Any time somebody says "a real man does this, says this, and wears this" that is an observation that gender is a social construct. It is all of the behaviours and relationships and the norms and the circumstances that are around this concept of what a male person is.”
― Dan McClellan