Notes from my Knapsack 3-27-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 3-27-2025
Jeff Gill

A peculiar word with some specific import
___




With a little over a year to the big celebration of our 250th anniversary of American independence (see America250-Ohio.org for more info!), I asked you to think with me about the specific wording and intentions of that founding document for our lives in the United States today.

Officially speaking, the final version of our Declaration of Independence says: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

There's a funny, and even mildly controversial word in there: unalienable. It's not one we use much in everyday speech. You could say "Hey, that hot dog is unalienable from my plate!" but it might not stop someone from swiping it.

As for unalienable, the early drafts of the Declaration as Thomas Jefferson wrote it, called our rights "inalienable." If you visit the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC, the letters on the wall inside say "inalienable." In fact, Carl Becker, a legal scholar and historian pointed out in 1922: "The Rough Draft reads "[inherent &] inalienable.""

Jefferson's draft earlier didn't say "self-evident," either: he said "We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable," and went on to assert "that all men are created equal & independant." In other words, the Continental Congress had a say in the final version.

We don't know when or how that Congress changed "inalienable" to "unalienable"; but it appears in the official Congressional Journal and in the parchment copy. That's how John Adams wrote it in his notes: "unalienable." It might well have been his idea.

Either way, so what? Most dictionaries make it clear it's a question of style; either word means the same thing. Something that's inalienable or unalienable is that which cannot be taken away.

Obviously, there's a tension here in that life or liberty, let alone pursuing happiness, can be taken away. It's been known to happen. Jefferson's argument, and the final form adopted by the Second Continental Congress, is that government cannot casually or justly take away life, restrict liberty, or restrain the pursuit of happiness. These rights pre-exist the government, and do not derive from the state or civic order itself: they are always "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Which is where I find "unalienable" interesting, and a source of our understanding of civil rights which comes to fuller flower in the Bill of Rights, some fifteen years later.

Because when a "Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." That's the unalienableness of our rights as Americans. Sure, government can take, or try to take certain rights: people do get pulled over in traffic, stopped for cause, arrested under warrant. Various forms of speech and communication can be limited under a variety of tests and with the strict scrutiny of a court's review.

But the rights come first, not the government, and if the government is abusive or neglectful of protecting our self-evident (even sacred and undeniable) rights, the consent of the governed comes into play. Ideally, through elections, and the electoral activity that takes place in between, up to and including recall, or even impeachment.

Meanwhile, our rights still exist, and are in an existential sense, unalienable.

Or inalienable, if you prefer.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he likes to stop and ask questions about obvious things. That's his right, isn't it? Interrogate his questions at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 3-21-2025

Faith Works 3-21-2025
Jeff Gill

Taking a look at The Book for Lent
___




"Why bother reading the Bible?"

As someone who is a Christian minister in a public role, forms of that question come up often. They're both highly variable, and all orbiting around the common axis of "it's an old book, so…"

In the modern world, there's a sort of built in assumption, a prevailing headwind, that any old book is generally superseded by new books.

In fact one of the reasons for my interest in the Bible as a durable, useful library of ancient texts is the intense and ongoing effort of sifting and sorting that has resulted in the collection of books that is what we call "the Holy Bible." Under that term, we talk about a library of texts, roughly three fourths (by verses) out of the Hebrew language and a quarter from Greek with fragments of Aramaic, a cousin of Hebrew, scattered within.

The book count in the Protestant Bible is 39 Old Testament books, 27 New Testament writings. Catholic Bibles include seven intertestamental books, plus modest additional sections for Esther and Daniel; the Eastern Orthodox Bible includes a few more deuterocanonical books, plus one more psalm. These are often referred to as "apocrypha," and generally the reason they are not in Protestant Bibles is because Luther in German Bibles and later Calvin in Geneva demoted them in terms of their sacred status.

All of which goes to my basic point: there's been a process of sifting a wide range of writings presented as sacred or inspired across religious history for over four thousand years. We still have hundreds, even thousands of ancient texts, many of which fall into the category of "pseudepigrapha," sometimes called "the lost books of the Bible."

Every year close to Easter, even before the cable era, media of all sorts would run stories about "what they haven't told you" or "books hidden from the general public" which people would latch onto and then ask me about as a parish minister. I get it, this was clickbait before we had clicks, and now it's all over the internet.

My usual response then, when we had three channels on broadcast TV, or now with the torrent of online misinformation, is "if these books are so hidden, why does some schlub in Ohio have paperback copies of most of them on his shelves?" And I'd pull a volume off, hand it over, and say "read it, and tell me if that deserves to be in the Bible along with Job and Luke's Gospel." For those who actually took the book and read a bit, the answer was always "that's a hot mess." Exactly.

For readers who are already believers, I can hear an objection to the tack I'm taking here. "Hey, Jeff, the Bible is the word of God, revealed to us for our salvation: say that!" Gotcha. But this column is, I like to keep mentioning, aimed not just at those already in a church: it's intended to speak to those who have some interest in faith, but may not find themselves drawn to organized religion. They don't start with even an acceptance that there is someone called "God" just to start with.

Inspiration is part of the final mix, I guarantee you. What I'd like to do for a few weeks leading to Easter, though, is invite even those not church affiliated to take a look at the 66 books collected over millennia, and edited by both saints and sinners, to give us a library of spiritual reflection, and yes, inspiration, called The Bible.

So keep reading, and let me know how the Spirit moves you…


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a few things to say about the Bible as it is. Tell him what you're curious about at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.