Today, though, I want to back away from that initial fear a bit. After thinking this through, I'm not so sure the snake-handlers are theologically naive. In fact, I now think I have a lot in common with them. I've posted the rest beneath the fold (it gets rather long), but with a little patience, let me lay out why I think they're headed in the right direction.
So, first, for the background.
Ralph Hood's Them that Believe is an excellent place to begin. It's one of the most comprehensive and scholarly social psychological assessment of the snake handling churches in America Appalachia. What I found most moving about Dr Hood's work was his deep sympathy for the snake handling churches. Before he did any filming Hood would spend over a year developing relationships. And Dr Hood is very sensitive about sensationalistic exploitation, media or journalists presenting the snake handling churches as crazy or a circus show. Hood and Williamson wanted to present a deep view, a view that was scientifically objective but that really tried to understand the snake handling experience from the inside out. I want to follow their lead (just as I wish the reality show might do) in thinking about these churches.
So, some history. Historically, the snake handling churches emerged from the Church of God (and from its schisms the Church of God of Prophecy and the Church of God with Signs Following which split off from the Church of God in the 1920s). The Church of God and its schisms come from the Holiness and Pentecostal traditions. The Holiness tradition makes the snake handling churches pietistic and sectarian. The Pentecostal influence makes them charismatic and revivalistic. The Church of God eventually repudiated the practice of snake handling. Consequently, some refer to the snake handling churches as the "renegade Churches of God".
Here's a fairly-balanced news report on snake-handling:
To really understand snake handling we must understand Penecostalism. The place to begin that is with the biblical witness itself.
The central text is Mark 16.17-18 from the King James Version of the Bible:
And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.Given the plain-sense meaning of the text Mark 16 suggests that five signs will follow "them that believe":
According to the snake handling churches four of these signs are "mandatory" and one is "conditional". This teaching is also derived from the plain-sense hermeneutic. Four of the five signs -- casting out devils, tongues, taking up serpents, healing the sick -- are connected with the words "they shall". Which is read to be an imperative/command. One of the signs breaks this template and begins with "if" making the practice of this sign -- drinking poison -- optional or voluntary. Most snake handling churches do provide poison -- often strychnine or carbolic acid -- in their service.
- Casting out of devils
- Speaking with new tongues
- Taking up serpents
- Being unhurt after drinking poison
- Healing the sick
I'd like to make a couple of interrelated observations about how the snake handling churches read Mark 16.
First, I'm struck by the fine-grained nature of the plain-sense reading. A single word -- the change from "shall" to "if" -- affects a very important (and perhaps deadly) teaching: How many signs are there? And are these signs "mandatory"?
But I'm not really surprised by this, because any number of plain-sense traditions have seen great debates swirl around the exact phrasings in Scripture.
Such are the joys of fine-grained plain-sense readings. Incidentally, this sort of reading is not unique to fundamentalist Christians. Certain Jewish sects believe that every letter of the Torah is infused with spiritual significance. This finds it most extreme expression in the Bible Code craze. Those believing the Bible Code suggest that prophetic/predictive messages are encoded in the biblical text. The most common method for extracting the code from the biblical text is the Equidistant Letter Sequence method, where you pick a letter from the Bible and begin to count a fixed number circling each letter in the sequence. As critics point out, this method only works when every single letter in the Bible is exactly accurate! But, as any biblical scholar knows, there are many, many textual variants in existence. Given this situation, which text is the "true" and authoritative Word of God? Because one letter out of place throws the Equidistant Letter Sequence completely out of whack.
The Bible Code aside, there are legitmate interests in the letters of Scritpure. There are many places where the Tanakh (Old Testament) engages in letterplay to make a point about the Torah structuring life and the cosmos. This letterplay is generally lost in English translations. Consider the great Torah song Psalm 119. Psalm 119 is one of several alphabetic acrostic poems in the book of Psalms. Psalm 119 is a song about delighting in the Law of God. To make this point visually as well as semantically the psalm has its 176 verses divided into 22 stanzas of eight lines each. Each of the 22 stanzas corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet and each of the eight lines within a given stanza starts with the letter governing that stanza. Thus, stanza one is Aleph, the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, and each of the eight lines in the first stanza begins with the letter Aleph. The next stanza is Beth. All the way to the final stanza of Tav. English readers of Psalm 119 miss all this. For example, here are the first verses of Psalm 119, the Aleph section:
You see, reading from right-to-left as you do in Hebrew, that each line begins with the letter Aleph.
The point of the letterplay in Psalm 119 is to show how the Torah structures our whole lives. This is communicated not just in the meaning of the text but in the visual display of the text on the page.
The point here is that meaning is conveyed in the Tanakh (Old Testament) visually as well as semantically. The actual letters and how they are used often convey great meaning. English translations of the Bible lose this visual aspect. And this brings me to my second point.
The only way Christians can maintain a fine-grained plain-sense hermeneutic is for them to fix (similar to the Bible Code) the translation within their tradition. Very often this is the King James Version. The KJV is considered to be the authoritative text, the exact Word of God. Obviously, this is a strange claim -- as the Bible was written in Greek and Hebrew. The KJV is a translation. And, as a translation, it has numerous flaws and problems. Regardless, we can get a sense here as to why a tradition might want to fix and formalize the translations its people will use. If everyone is using the KJV and the exact wording of the KJV is authoritative then we can resolve congregational debates. A side effect of this are those fine-grained distinctions between "shall" versus "if" and "children" versus "child". If many disparate translations are in use within a given congregation the waters get muddy very quickly as the alternative translations muck up a fine-grained plain-sense reading. If the KJV and the New International Version have different wordings which should be taken as the authoritative Word of God?
This is why many fundamentalist church see leaving the KJV as the first step on the road to relativism. Once you allow multiple translations in the church you quickly face the problem of hermeneutics and interpretation which confuses how we are to discern the "truth". In short, although the claim that the KJV is the authoritative Word of God is strange to the extreme, we can see what the fundamentalist churches are trying to accomplish by restricting themselves to an authoritative and common text. Without a teaching office many fundamentalist churches are reduced to a populist method of reading and interpreting Scripture (i.e., everyone gets a say). This populist style is very prone to conflict. Multiple translations would only make the situation worse. Restricting use to the KJV becomes, then, a conflict-reduction strategy.
The use of the KJV has important implications for the snake handling churches. Specifically, although Mark 16.17-18 is included in the KJV, modern scholars consider this part of Mark to be a later addition. One of several in fact. Most modern translations alert the reader to this scholarly consensus (check your own translation to see how they accomplish this, some are subtle while some very obvious). In short, the authoritative text for snake handling isn't really a part of the original biblical text (if there is such a thing as "the original biblical text").
But facing up to this fact creates a problem similar to the one we discussed above. If we admit modern scholarship into the Bible (i.e., if you read that footnote in your modern translation) we begin to see the the Bible as a historical and contested human product. We begin to enter the debates about the Canon, how the Bible was written and selected. And as New Testament scholars tell us, this process was very messy and very often political. And it is still going on! All this raises the specter of relativism, modernism and secularism.
So much for the biblical warrant. What about the history?
The snaking handling churches of Appalachia are a part of American Pentecostalism. Most church histories trace the modern Pentecostal movement to the Azusa Street Revival.
The Azusa Street Revival, led by William J Seymour, was a Pentecostal revival that took place in Los Angeles, California at the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The revival began in 1906 and lasted for almost ten years. During that time, thousands of people made the pilgrimage to participate in the nightly worship services, services characterized by emotional worship and ecstatic spiritual experience such a speaking in tongues. The particular theological innovation at Azusa Street was the explicit teaching that speaking in tongues (glossolalia) was the definitive marker of Holy Ghost baptism. This teaching became one of the defining features of American Pentecostalism. A contemporary example of the experience can be seen here on YouTube, where the description of the clip reads: "Brother H.M. receives the holy Ghost baptism, with the evidence of speaking in tongues".
The rise of the Pentecostal snake handling sects is generally credited to George Went Hensley. As we saw earlier, Mark 16 explicitly cites speaking in tongues as one the the signs that should mark the church. But Mark 16 also mentions serpent handling. What about that sign? It was Hensley who demanded hermeneutical consistency in the interpretation of Mark 16, teaching that serpent handling was a sign of the Spirit along with the other Pentecostal experiences, speaking in tongues in particular.
According to Appalachia oral tradition, around the year 1910, a few years after his 1908 Holy Ghost baptism at the Church of God at Owl Hollow in Tennessee, Hensley climbed White Oak Mountain to confront his growing disillusionment that Pentecostal preachers were preaching only three of the five signs mentioned in Mark 16. As reported by JB Collins the following events transpired on White Oak Mountain:
[Hensley's] decision was to risk his life in order to have rest from his spiritual burden. Thus it was that he set out on probably the first religious snake hunt in modern civilized history.Hensley descended the mountain, snake in hand, and launched his first snake handling revival meeting in the community of Grasshopper Valley. So powerful were these revivals in their demonstration of the Holy Spirit that snake handling began to spread throughout the Appalachia region and, for a brief time, was endorsed by the Churches of God.
In a great rocky gap in the mountainside he found what he sought, a large rattlesnake. He approached the reptile, and, disreguarding [sic] its buzzing, blood-chilling warning, knelt a few feet away from it and prayed loudly into the sky for God to remove his fear and to anoint him with "the power." Then suddenly with a shout he leaped forward and grasped the reptile and held it in trembling hands.
George Went Hensley died in 1955 at the age 75 from a snakebite during one of his revivals in Florida. Having been bitten by snakes at least 446 times, this bite on the wrist from a five foot rattlesnake proved fatal. As he lay dying Hensley reportedly said, "The snake would not have struck -- if fear had not come over someone here."
Hensley's death was ruled a suicide by the Calhoun County sheriff.
I'd like to make a few observations about religious experience in light of the Azusa Street Revival and Hensley's experience on White Oak Mountain.
First, whatever you think about George Went Hensley you have to admire his hermeneutical consistency! We all pick and choose from the Bible. But this isn't too surprising as every faith tradition reads the Bible selectively. Even Pentecostals. Just ask George Went Hensley.
But my more important observation has to do with religious experience. Ecstatic experiences have always been a part of Christianity. And outbreaks of charismatic fervor seem to sweep across the faith in waves, the pathos of the Spirit waxing and waning.
No doubt there are a variety of explanations for these charismatic outbreaks. Whatever the explanation, I think it clear that many people crave ecstatic religious experience. It's my assessment that this craving is particularly acute during modernity. During this Age of Reason it's particularly difficult, on intellectual grounds, to be a person of faith. Consequently, I think many people seek out religious experience as a form of apologetics, as a first-person (and, thus, irrefutable) experience with God. Pentecostalism provides that experience. And its anti-intellectualism is its virtue in this regard. It's a way toward belief when truth-claims are hard to come by.
But it's hard to maintain the fever pitch of Pentecostalism. Many, over time, become disillusioned. Some wander from church to church looking for the something new, some form of worship that can rekindle the emotions and fire the passions. In this, I can see the attraction of snake handling. I doubt it ever gets old or boring. Maybe it does, but I'd expect facing death every worship service takes awhile to get used to.
While, as I've already observed, there may seem to be shady or dubious biblical warrant, let's step back a minute and look at the larger biblical witness. I think you'll be surprised.
Consider.
The serpent appears at the very beginning of Scripture as the prime mover in the Fall. And after the Fall there is this notion that the offspring of Eve will have victory or power over the snake. These events in the Garden set up the soteriological trajectory of Scripture and the serpent is mixed in with all of it.
Genesis 3.1-5, 13-15The Hebrews were similar to many other cultures in this regard, finding the serpent to be a powerful (if malevolent) spiritual symbol. Consider how Moses and Pharaoh use power over serpents in their dual to free the children of Israel from bondage:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"
The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "
"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
....
Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?"
The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."
So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this,
"Cursed are you above all the livestock
and all the wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel."
Exodus 8.7-12In short, power over snakes becomes a sign of God's liberating and salvific action. Power over snakes is one of the signs of God's Exodus. This soteriological theme finds its way into the New Testament by connecting the cross with power over snakes. Specifically, in Numbers 21, as a punishment for unfaithfulness, the camp of the wandering Israelites becomes overrun with poisonous vipers. Many die. To save the community Moses approaches God for help and he gets a curious, but effective, response:
The LORD said to Moses and Aaron, "When Pharaoh says to you, 'Perform a miracle,' then say to Aaron, 'Take your staff and throw it down before Pharaoh,' and it will become a snake."
So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the LORD commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron's staff swallowed up their staffs.
Numbers 21.8-9What is striking about this story is that Jesus uses it in the gospels, comparing his death on the cross to the bronze serpent:
The LORD said to Moses, "Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live." So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, he lived.
John 3.14-15In all of this we continue to see power over snakes as symbolic of the saving actions of God, the breaking in of the Kingdom of God. Thus, manuscript evidence aside, it's not, from a theological stance, surprising to see serpent handling as one of the signs of the Kingdom of God. There is biblical evidence that leads us to expect just such a sign. We've seen how the serpent is a motif of the Fall, the Exodus, and the Crucifixion. In short, power over serpents is a powerful soteriological symbol.
Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.
And there is more. The book of Acts includes a story where survival from snakebite is taken as a sign of the gospel. The story recounts events shortly after the apostle Paul and his associates were washed ashore on the island Malta after a storm at sea:
Acts 28.1-6For the snake handling churches Acts 28 corroborates their interpretation of Mark 16. Immunity to snake venom is a sign of the proclamation of the Kingdom of God. And, as a final biblical thread, there are the eschatological themes from Revelation where victory over the Serpent of Eden is recounted:
Once safely on shore, we found out that the island was called Malta. The islanders showed us unusual kindness. They built a fire and welcomed us all because it was raining and cold. Paul gathered a pile of brushwood and, as he put it on the fire, a viper, driven out by the heat, fastened itself on his hand. When the islanders saw the snake hanging from his hand, they said to each other, "This man must be a murderer; for though he escaped from the sea, Justice has not allowed him to live." But Paul shook the snake off into the fire and suffered no ill effects. The people expected him to swell up or suddenly fall dead, but after waiting a long time and seeing nothing unusual happen to him, they changed their minds and said he was a god.
Revelation 20.1-2What I find interesting in all this is that the snake handling churches are often considered to be hermeneutical and exegetical naifs. Witness their nonsensical enshrinement of the King James Version and their simplistic plain-sense hermeneutic. In short, we wouldn't expect the snake handlers to be particularly keen on theology. But here's the interesting thing, to me a least. If the snake handlers did go in for academic theology I think they could make a respectable case. I've just sketched how such a project might look. There are rich soteriological and eschatological themes associated with power over serpents. The serpent is implicated in critical soteriological events -- The Fall, the Exodus, the Crucifixion. Power over serpents is a sign of the proclamation of the gospel (Mark 16 and Acts 28). The serpent is there in the beginning scenes of Genesis and in the final events of Revelation, dramatically linking the two.
And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain. He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.
In short, although the snake handling churches might look like biblical simpletons, from a theological stance, if you step back and look at it, what they are doing seems very consistent, fits right in, with the biblical narrative. That is, you couldn't, on biblical grounds, win an argument with them. If anything, they would have you biblically and theologically cornered.
What sense do we make, then, of the experience of snake-handling? For me, the most interesting aspect of the snake handling churches is the experience of snakebite. How do these churches "make sense", theologically speaking, of that experience? Particularly when the snakebite leads to a death in the community?
To start, one of the best aspects of Hood and Williamson's book Them That Believe is their exhaustive phenomenological assessment, through hours of intensive interviews, of the experience of snake handling.
Simplifying, the core experience of snake handling is a Death/Victory motif. As the people in the church move toward the snakes and reach into the boxes they report a keen awareness of death. As their preachers repeatedly say, "There is death in these boxes". In short, the act of snake handling is an eschatological act, the demonstration of victory over death. Death is the real enemy being confronted. The snakes and the poisons are just manifestations of Death.
Pausing for a moment, I would like to note that in this emphasis -- victory over Death itself -- the snake handling churches have much in common with the Greek Orthodox. Latin Christianity has tended to focus on justification, being saved from the consequences of sin. Thus, in Latin Christianity salvation tends to be reduced to being saved from hellfire. But for the Orthodox, Death is the soteriological focus. This is clearly seen in the Orthodox Easter icons which focus on Christ's Harrowing of Hell, his decent into hell after his death to free Adam and Eve (and those who died "in Adam") from Death. Snake handling churches are similar to the Orthodox in that they place victory over Death at the center of their soteriological experience. (What's more, theologically, I think the Orthodox are more correct than the Latins. Death, I believe, is the theologically significant argument, not sin. Which means I also -- at least theologically -- understand where the snake-handlers are headed in this experience.)
But the trouble is, people do die in snake handling churches. How is "victory" experienced in those instances? And it's not just death. Many snakebites are extraordinarily painful and lead to lasting tissue damage. Practitioners survive but they may go through hours and days of excruciating pain. How do they make sense of that pain?
In Appendix 1 of Them that Believe Hood and Williamson document the number of deaths associated with snakebite in the snake handling churches. According to their tally, from 1921 to 2006 there have been 90 documented deaths associated with snake handling worship. That averages out to about one death per year. Which might not seem like a lot, but these are very small and tight knit communities. One death a year is pretty significant.
So how do you experience victory over death in the face of this experience when you, annually, witness or hear a report about a death within the church?
First, the snake handling churches fairly quickly abandoned a triumphalistic stance toward snake handling. An overrealized eschatology was quickly jettisoned. It quickly became clear that "the anointing", the prompt of the Holy Ghost to move forward in worship to take up serpents, did not confer immunity to snakebite or snake venom. People got bit, people suffered from the venom and some people died. So the "victory" could no longer be associated with miraculous immunity. How to make sense of this experience?
The first way of making sense is to blame the snakebite on some moral or spiritual failure. Common attributions are spiritual pride (being cocky in handling the serpents), disobedience, an unconfessed sin or a misinterpretation of the anointing.
But this route to sense-making runs dry after awhile. It is difficult to keep a congregation motivated if you keep blaming them for snakebite. Again, the experience to be preserved is one of victory. Not just individually, but communally.
In light of this the snake handling churches have centered their interpretation of victory upon the act of obedience. And, interestingly, their plain-sense hermeneutic helps them here. Examine the exact wording from the key text of Mark 16.17-18:
And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.Notice anything? There's no promise of immunity. All the text says is that them that believe shall "pick up snakes with their hands". That's it. That's the sign. It's not immunity. It is, rather, simply picking the snakes up. Even if you get bit. Even if you die.
The victory here is in the act of obedience. The sign to the unbeliever is the act of faith and obedience, the eschatological fearlessness in the face of Death.
In short, the miracle here isn't external, it's internal. It occurs within the heart of the believer, in the collective testimony of the community that death has no hold on them. They, in light of Christ, have no fear of death. And this isn't a theological abstraction, it's demonstrated in flesh and blood during every worship service. It is the sign of them that believe.
What I find very, very interesting about all this is that I can see parallels between my religious journey and the journey of the snake handling churches.
First, I resonate with the shift in the snake handling churches from metaphysics to obedience. The "signs" from God are experienced through obedience to the Way. This is, interestingly, a move growing more and more common within Christianity. Scot McKnight has summarized this impulse in the emergent church movement:
The emerging movement's connection to postmodernity may grab attention and garner criticism, but what most characterizes emerging is the stream best called praxis -- how the faith is lived out ...
A notable emphasis of the emerging movement is orthopraxy, that is, right living. The contention is that how a person lives is more important than what he or she believes ...My second similarity with the snake handling churches has to do with their embrace of fearlessness in the face of Death as a sign of the church. Consider the words of William Stringellow:
Resurrection, however, refers to the transcendence of the power of death and the fear or thrall of the power of death, here and now, in this life, in this world. Resurrection, thus, has to do with life and, indeed, the fulfillment of life before death.The point that Stringfellow is making is that true life -- deeply ethical humane life -- cannot be experienced when we live in the thrall of Death. When we fear things like economic downturns or government imprisonment (think of Mandela in prison). Victory over Death isn't simply about life after death. Victory over Death involves eschatological fearlessness in this life. For it is only though such fearlessness that our humanity can be rescued and embraced. Otherwise our lives are pushed and pulled by our survival instincts, our needs for security or a pay check or protecting my place in the world. We become hoarding, aggressive Malthusian creatures.
[Christ's] power over death is effective not just at the terminal point of a person's life but throughout one's life, during this life in this world, right now. This power is effective in the times and places in the daily lives of human beings when they are so gravely and relentlessly assailed by the claims of principalities for an idolatry that, in spite of all disguises, really surrenders to death as the reigning presence in the life of the world. His resurrection means the possibility of living in this life, in the very midst of death's works, safe and free from death.
In short, although I'll never take up serpents, I resonate with the eschatological focus of the practice. I understand that the fear of Death is what cripples humane and ethical living. Consequently, in my own way I also try to "take up serpents" in my life, embracing victory in the face of Death. Maybe the serpent is a job, a professional reputation, a house, or a bank account. Things we strive to hold onto and protect because these things represent "life". But they're not life -- they are, rather, manifestations of death and fear.
So when I pick up my paycheck or pink slip I have to take it up like the snake handlers take up their serpents. I have to say to the paycheck: "You are not life. And my fear of losing you is Death". I have to absorb the snakebite of the pink slip and say: "You are not Death. My fear of you is Death".
So the preacher calls to us to come forward. Fear rises in the heart. The preacher reminds, "There is death in these boxes". It takes faith to move into that eschatological fearlessness. To look Death in the eye. But there is victory in the fearlessness.
And it is a sign following them that believe.