Suffer the little children

In Cultures of the Religious Right today, after discussing Mark Noll's account of Luther - whom I paraphrased as "the anti-Obama: no we can't" - it was time for our weekly group work on a Bible passage. For a variety of reasons I picked Mark 10:1-27. It contains Jesus' strongest condemnation of divorce (what God hath joined together...) and of wealth (easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God) as well as a happy scene with children (Suffer the little children to come unto me...), a reference to the earlier and generally neglected first account of the creation of Adam and Eve in Gen 1:27 (from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female), a digest of the decalogue, a proof text for the heresy of Arianism (there is none good but one, God), and, right after the camel and the eye of the needle, a no we can't passage:

And they were astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved?
And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible. (All quotations are from the King James Bible)

It's way too much to do all at once, but we don't have a lot of time and I wanted students to see that right-wing (sexual ethics) and left-wing (economic justice) Christian social issues appear back-to-back in scripture. And I was curious to see which of the many possible topics would catch their eye. To my surprise (less in retrospect), students didn't even pause to notice the divorce discussion - it's invisible as an issue in liberal 2008, and they weren't surprised (as I'd expected) to discover or rediscover the two accounts in Genesis; we'll return to divorce when gay marriage comes up in a few weeks, and the two accounts when I'm ready to assert that it is impossible to read the Bible literally, and anyone who says it can be done has never tried it. The condemnation of wealth seemed old hat to them, too, so I pointed out to them that the passage appears (also) to be saying that the salvation of the rich is not impossible for God, but the salvation of anyone - rich or poor - is impossible for human beings; I think I'm right to remember that this passage was used in Pope John Paul 2's condemnation of liberation theology. What did they focus on instead? To my sadness it was this:

And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them ...
And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.

How the Catholic clergy scandals have poisoned the wells.